When considering the critical reputation of Black Boy it is important to note that the novel was available only in a truncated version until 1977. In that year, the full text, American Hunger, was published. This work gives the reader a very different view of Richard because the hope granted by the escape to the North at the "end" of the first section is undercut by the broken American dream found in Chicago in the second part. However, Black Boy in its 1945 version was well received and remains a popular work to this day. Critically, the work has been viewed as Wright's masterpiece, a twentieth-century version of the slave narrative, and a work of protest against racism, censorship, and intolerance. More recently, criticism has been focused on the restored novel (the version established by the Library of America) as cultural critique and a weapon against censorship. Such recent reviews have also looked more closely at the novel as pure sociology or, as Ellison previously suggested, at the Joycean quality of Wright's writing. This latter view sees Richard as a black version of Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Ralph Ellison reviewed Wright's novel for the Antioch Review in 1945 in an essay entitled "Richard Wright's Blues". To him the work was a "blues-tempered" lyric such as Bessie Smith might sing. Richard Wright, Ellison went on, had given himself a duplicitous role: "to discover and depict the meaning of Negro Experience; and to reveal to both Negroes and whites those problems of a psychological and emotional nature which arise between them when they strive for mutual understanding." This became the aim of the "Wright School of Urban Realism". They were a group of authors inspired by Wright to use writing, as Robert A. Bone put it in The Negro Novel in America (1965), as a "means of dispelling inner tensions of race ... [and through a fictional protagonist] alter [white] attitude toward race."

In addition to Ellison, the novel was reviewed by Lionel Trilling for The Nation, on April 7, 1945. Trilling applauded Wright's effort, saying, "He has the objectivity which comes from refusing to be an object." A few months later, in an article for Esquire (June 23, 1945), Sinclair Lewis took a more direct approach. His review took the opportunity not to be critical of Wright but of America. Lewis defended the book against those who were made uncomfortable by it. He said there could be no reason to doubt the veracity of the book's report on living conditions for blacks given the echo found in official reports made by the NAACP, the daughter of a white Navy officer (Ruth Donenhower Wilson) in a book on Jim Crow, the U.S. government itself, and others. All told, he said, the South does in fact practice Jim Crowism and the North is not much better. Why, Lewis wonders with the NAACP, should Jim Crowism exist even within the troops and the Red Cross in the European war— within the "Army of Democracy" itself?

In the 1950s, the reputation of Wright ebbed as Ellison and Baldwin came into popularity. However, in the 1960s, black militancy preferred the forthright attitude of Wright, and his popularity rose to new heights Ronald Sanders, in "Richard Wright and the Sixties," had nothing but praise for Wright. Saunders called Black Boy Wright's masterpiece but also his swan song. Critically, the novel was regarded for what it was doing as a sociological study. For example, in The Art of Richard Wright , Edward Margolies portrays Wright as a generalist...